This original collection brings islands to the fore in a growing body of scholarship on the Indian Ocean, examining them as hubs or points of convergence and divergence in a world of maritime movements and exchanges. Straddling history and anthropology and grounded in the framework of connectivity, the book tackles central themes such as smallness, translocality, and "the island factor." It moves to the farthest reaches of the region, with a rich variety of case studies on the Swahili-Comorian world, the Maldives, Indonesia, and more. With remarkable breadth and cohesion, these essays capture the circulations of people, goods, rituals, sociocultural practices, and ideas that constitute the Indian Ocean world. Together, they take up "islandness" as an explicit empirical and methodological issue as few have done before.

This book is about a ‘Small Island’, namely Mauritius in the southwestern Indian Ocean. It is also about a ‘Large Ocean’, the Indian Ocean world—its peoples, histories and cultures. It casts light on the life of an island through what is known not only about the island itself, but also through what is known about the wider Indian Ocean world. It is also about the Indian Ocean world in that it focuses on an island, which, in many senses and dimensions, is not only a model of, but in some respects also a model for wider developments and features of relevance to the Indian Ocean world as a whole.

This collection of essays deals with the rituals of kingship and royalty in India, Africa and Europe from the social anthropological and ethno historical points of view. It discusses the dialectical entanglements of rituals conducted for and by kings (including, 'little kings' and 'jungle kings') with the wider social, political, cultural, historical, religious and economic contexts in which they were embedded. Part I begins with a triangular comparison of kingship among the Shilluks of East Africa, the Gajapatis of eastern India and kings in Renaissance France. The essay entitled the 'King's Three Bodies' makes use of Ernst H. Kantorowicz's classical study, The King's Two Bodies in medieval political theology and extends it, not only in terms of the numbers of bodies that are found to be significant, but also theo retically. Another significant essay in this part looks at the unexpected but significant theoretical impact of social anthropological studies of acephalous, segmentary lineage societies in Africa on Indian historiography. The second part of this volume consists of three chapters dealing with the royal patronage of tribal and Hindu goddesses in Eastern India, while the third part presents studies on sleeping (and dreaming) kings and on the power of dead kings, a discussion of A.M. Hocart's dictum that the first kings must have been dead kings. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers Fahad Ahmad Bishara Eva-Maria Knoll Karl-Heinz Kohl Lisa Jenny Krieg Pedro Machado Rupert Neuhöfer Mareike Pampus Hannah Pilgrim Burkhard Schnepel Hanne Schönig Tansen Sen Steven Serels Julia Verne Kunbing Xiao

An innovative collection of essays that foregrounds specific cargoes as a means to understand connectivity and mobility across the Indian Ocean world. Scholars have long appreciated the centrality of trade and commerce in understanding the connectivity and mobility that underpin human experience in the Indian Ocean region. But studies of merchant and commercial activities have paid little attention to the role that cargoes have played in connecting the disparate parts of this vast oceanic world. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, geographers, and historians, Cargoes in Motion tells the story of how material objects have informed and continue to shape processes of exchange across the Indian Ocean. By following selected cargoes through both space and time, this book makes an important and innovative contribution to Indian Ocean studies. The multidisciplinary approach deepens our understanding of the nature and dynamics of the Indian Ocean world by showing how transoceanic connectivity has been driven not only by economic, social, cultural, and political factors but also by the materiality of the objects themselves. Essays by: Edward A. Alpers Fahad Ahmad Bishara Eva-Maria Knoll Karl-Heinz Kohl Lisa Jenny Krieg Pedro Machado Rupert Neuhöfer Mareike Pampus Hannah Pilgrim Burkhard Schnepel Hanne Schönig Tansen Sen Steven Serels Julia Verne Kunbing Xiao

This book is about the making and unmaking of socio- cultural differences, seen from anthropological, sociological, and philosophical perspectives. Some contributions are of a theoretical nature, such as when the "problem of translation," "the enigma of alienity," or "queer theory" are addressed; others shed light on contemporary issues, such as the integration of Muslims in Norway, identity-forming processes in Creole societies or neo-traditionalist movements and identity in Africa. Moreover, the book deals with strangers looked at from an "anthropology of the night" perspective. Special emphasis is placed on how globalization and the rapid spread of increasingly new technologies of information have generated new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and how these can be theorized.

Richard Rottenburg and Burkhard Schnepel are both professors of cultural anthropology. Shingo Shimada holds a chair in Intercultural Sociology at the newly founded Institute for Ethnology (Cultural Anthropolgy) at Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. The editors areas of interest include: anthropology of law, organization, science and technology in Africa, diaspora-migration-transculture, and intercultural comparison/translation/intercultural understanding.

Travelling Pasts, edited by Burkhard Schnepel and Tansen Sen, offers an innovative exploration of the issue of heritage in the Indian Ocean world. This collection of essays demonstrates how the heritagization of the past has played a vital role in processes and strategies related to the making of socio-cultural identities, the establishing of political legitimacies, and the pursuit of economic and geopolitical gains. The contributions range from those dealing with the impact of UNESCO's World Heritage Convention in the Indian Ocean world as a whole to those that address the politics of cultural heritage in various distinct maritime sites such as Zanzibar, Mayotte, Cape Town, the Maldives, Calcutta and Penang. Also examined are the Maritime Silk Road and the Project Mausam initiatives of the Chinese and Indian governments respectively. The volume is an important contribution to the transdisciplinary fields on Indian Ocean Studies.